The small print on propaganda, rationality and revolutionary consciousness: Question everything!

But it is precisely modernity that is always quoting primeval history. This happens through the ambiguity attending the social relationships & products of this epoch.

Ambiguity is the pictorial image of dialectics, the law of dialectics seen at a standstill. This standstill is utopia & the dialectical image therefore a dream image.

Such an image is presented by the pure commodity: as fetish. Such an image are the arcades, which are both house & stars. Such an image is the prostitute, who is saleswoman & wares in one.  Walter Benjamin

Beyond what is properly secret, spectacular discourse obviously silences anything it finds inconvenient. It isolates what it shows from its context, its past, the intentions and the consequences. It is thus completely illogical. Since no one can contradict it, the spectacle has the right to contradict itself, to correct its own past. The arrogant attitude of its servants, when they have to make known some new, and perhaps still more dishonest version of certain facts, is to harshly correct the ignorance and bad interpretations they attribute to their public, while the day before they themselves were busily disseminating the error, with their customary assurance. Thus the spectacle's instruction and the spectators' ignorance are wrongly seen as antagonistic factors when in fact they give birth to each other.

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a fabulous distance, among its unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecile who has advanced spectacularly, there are only the mediatics [ad-men] who can respond with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations, and they are miserly, for besides their extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's general authority and the society it expresses, makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be damaged. It must not be forgotten that all mediatics, through wages and other rewards and recompenses, has a master, and sometimes several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.

All experts are mediatics  Statists  and only in that way are they recognized as experts. Every expert follows his master, because all former possibilities for independence have almost been reduced to nil by present society's conditions of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who lies. Those who need experts are, for different reasons, falsifiers and ignoramuses. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer a formal reassurance.

It is permitted to change a person's whole past, radically modify it, recreate it in the manner of the Moscow trials  and without even having recourse to the clumsiness of a trial. One can kill at less cost. Those who govern the integrated spectacular, or their friends, surely have no lack of false witnesses  though they may be unskilled  but what capacity to detect this clumsiness can remain among the spectators who will be witnesses to the exploits of the false witnesses or false documents, which are always highly effective? Thus it is no longer possible to believe anything about anyone that you have not learned for yourself, directly. But in fact false accusations are rarely necessary. Once one controls the mechanism that operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes. The movement of the spectacular demonstration proves itself simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation on the unique terrain where anything can be publicly affirmed, and be made believed, precisely because that is the only thing to which everyone is witness. Spectacular authority can similarly deny whatever it likes, once, or three times over, and say that it will no longer speak of it and speak of something else instead, knowing full well there is no danger of any other riposte, on its own terrain or any other.

When the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it is as if it did not exist. For it has then gone on to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.

The individual who has been marked by impoverished spectacular thought more deeply than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to show himself as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of the success obtained by spectacular domination.

To this list of the triumphs of power we should, however, add one result which has proved negative for it: a State, in which one has durably installed a great deficit of historical knowledge so as to manage it, can no longer be governed strategically.  Guy Debord

Bureaucractic growth and its increased specialization, atomization and dumbing down of 'machine components'  with concomitant loss of communication between them  requires insertion of redundancy (and therefore expansion), ultimately leading to total redundancy, still ineffectual components and breakdown of bureaucratic function.  Fenders๋n's Last Law of Cybernetics.

Propaganda is a gift given behind your back, with the upshot that you think it was yours all along. Because of this, it is never questioned and effectively becomes swept into the unconscious. It is 'given'. It provides the rationality for custom and the custom of irrationality  the justification for injustice. It is the "blind" in blind obedience, the project of education, the ambition of massive media.

Before there is a consciousness of liberation, there must precede a liberation of the unconscious. That on which we call "bullshit!" must first be brought to light  that which we would first assess must first be accessed. Only then may we ask "is this your idea or mine?"

In Tim Leary's paradigm, "turning on" is one method of accessing the unconscious and beyond, even to what he called "cellular knowledge"  instinct, organic, superorganic (to slightly bastardize Kroeber's term). Other persuits include meditation, strenuous physical exertion ("free" play) or even, according to Freud, many years of psychoanalysis. Surrealists thought one could be shocked into illumination through exposure to novelty. Early satyrists tried to humor or humiliate us into rethinking our positions. Reminiscent of Antonin Artaud, R. D. Laing said "madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death". The point is not merely the release of endorphins (pleasure) but the liberation of the unconscious  "tuning in", "centering", self-reflection, "critical" thinking, a discernment of freedom found in desiring realisation as much as realizing desire. At this point, one can then effectively "drop out", "decenter", "let go" or "go mad".

Leary thought this process should arrive/begin with our departure: "drop out, turn on, tune in". I would rather propose that dropping out is the last step of refusal, the first step in creating something new. I have always preferred the order: "turn on, tune in, drop out". Gurus or treatment centers become entirely unnecessary. Just as "turning on" had become reduced to "getting high" as the be-all and end-all, dropping out continues to be mistaken for a simple "withdrawal" or "escape". What is actually withdrawn is the support for the "basic" premises (if only unexpected semantic associations) we find we have unconsciously held on to  the customs and premises we find are not our own  the behavior and institutions which they accompany and which we have come to reject, which now only evoke our anger. When dropouts find comrades along the way, the "counterculture" is born, the condition of the state is denied, the state of the condition can transform. The real revolution is the emancipation of our everyday life, the realization that the "unique one" is not possible without intimacy with other unique ones, the ownership of the 'I' required for an appreciation of the "we" wherupon both disappear in the midst of a free-for-all.

But whatever their arrangement, these remain necessary conditions for acts of civil disobedience, a general strike, a mass uprising, an insurrectionary movement or a global revolution. They are also the necessary conditions for mental health: the exorcism of unwanted demons.

A determined revolutionary doesn't require authorization from a central committee before offing a pig. As a matter of fact, when the need arises, the true revolutionary will off the central committee...  Eldridge Cleaver 1969